What Liberal Arts Education Is For: A Manifesto

Really enjoyed this entire article. Couldn’t stop taking notes!

When I’m on a software project, I try to listen hard to what everyone is saying, to the words they choose...I ask critical questions about what people are really thinking, what we’re all hearing each other say, from the start.

Why? Code is a whole lot easier to change before it exists.

Here’s the hidden truth of education: You don’t know what you’re preparing for.

You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really.

Much of what you’re preparing for doesn’t even exist yet. We hope it doesn’t exist: don’t we educate students in the hope that they will make the world better by changing it? By creating new realities?

Doesn’t that mean education is impossible? Not at all! Because we’ve learned over time that there are kinds of learning that help people prepare for an unknown and unknowable future world. Not just specific skills or subjects, but kinds of learning: approaches rooted in curiosity, exploration, seeing closely, questioning, critical examination, taking multiple perspectives, using multiple kinds of tools, synthesis, communication, dialogue, relationships.

We will often only understand our formal learning in hindsight

Is a Religious Studies course “for” a software career? Well, is a Computer Science course “for” a software career? That Religious Studies course applied to my software career in exactly the same way that my Algorithms course applied: I rarely use (and have largely forgotten) the specific knowledge from it; I use its approach, its patterns of thought, constantly.

I want to copy paste everything in this article.

There is always a tension in education between teaching the knowably practical and the unknowably valuable.

So what is a liberal arts education?

learning that will be valuable in unknowable ways in an unknowable future

To be clear: both are necessary (vocational and liberal arts educations).

having no access to vocational education is as damaging as having only access to vocational education

What does liberal arts even mean? It means free as in self-determining.

If a person lives a life of servitude, if they are enslaved, don’t they need only vocational education? If their human existence has no utility beyond their job, if they cannot shape their world or create new paths through it, then why do they need anything but immediately practical skills? Why teach them things we know they don’t need? Isn’t it only free, fully privileged, self-determining people who also need a liberal arts education?

Think about that. Think the mixture of elitism and derision with which our society views “liberal arts” today. Think what that says about how we view human beings.

Damn, that burns. Especially in tech.

Then later:

The term “liberal arts” came from a world where servitude and slavery were the norm, where the power structures of society worked to limit self-determination and world-shaping to a select few. I wonder how different that world really is from ours.

It’s liberal arts as in liberation. Economic advancement is not liberation.

I cringe, cringe deeply, to my core, when people try to create socioeconomic mobility by force-pushing tech and STEM and give-them-lucrative-careers content into schools...because at its heart, this push is about meeting employer needs, not human needs. It is asking students to conform to the world, not to reshape it.

Later:

I don’t think that increasing the size of the STEM labor pool by shoving marginalized kids into it ends marginalization. I think it lowers labor costs for employers who are sick of paying people so much money to write software.

It’s the “shoving” that’s the problem. What should be at the center is fostering a person’s curiosity. This phrase sticks with me.

My curiosity changed my life.

career outcomes are [not] the ultimate justification for the utility of education:

Discovered via notes.billmill.org